A written excerpt of a piece we did on the Ungovernable Misfits Podcast Ungovernable Misfits - ACTION NEWS!!! Episode 5 - Don't Be a Pig 🐷

listen on Fountain https://fountain.fm/episode/CPUwis35ulQECV9OBLfX

or your favorite Podcasting 2.0 app

1993, a year packed with significant global events. For me I was in the middle of high school, bought a 1972 Mercury Montego GT fastback with a 351CJ, it looked just like the Grand Torino from Starsky and Hutch, I thought I was going to be a chef, cooking in busy restaurants where I grew up in Florida.

16-year-olds don’t tend to pay particular attention to National and Global politics. The big stories of the year were Waco, the first World Trade Center bombing (softening us up for the real deal), the establishment of the European Union, the signing of NAFTA (remember when the US used to manufacture things?), the killing of Pablo Escobar (best meme for waiting on someone), the Downing Street Declaration (British Drama for those who don’t know), the Oslo Accords (Jew/Palestinian drama for those who don’t know), and the year the World Wide Web started to become more widely used, 1993 could be the first year a 16 year old pervert waited for a boobie pic to download, line by line…by line….by line. I suppose I knew and understood those things important events were happening, I was a smart kid, didn’t I know?

Despite the gravity of these world-changing events, it’s the scandals and gossip that tend to dominate, in my memory at least. Think about it, if you’re old enough, do they dominate yours?

Shall we review the salacious stories of the time: Allegations of child molestation against Michael Jackson (I would never hurt a child, never), the stabbing of Tennis star Monica Seles, the fued between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and Nancy getting attacked early the next year, who can forget the name Jeff Gilhooly, “hey did you hear Tonya Harding’s boyfriend JEFF GILLOOLY bust up Nancy Kerrigan’s ankle wit a wrench or somthin?” How about Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold getting a divorce, even after Tom Arnold got her mug tattooed on his chest, Hey Max, the Spice Girls came out that year…isn’t that exciting, (there I included British pop culture shit as well).

I brought up 1993 not only because it was a formative year of my life but an image from that time is imprinted on my brain; Bat Boy, he was on the cover of the Weekly World News in the early 90s, in 93 they finally caught the little bastard as he was stranded on a roof of a house during a Mississippi flood, FBI got him, the Weekly World News added a bit of X-Files flavor for us. These stories were splashed across tabloids and TV screens, they captured normies attention in ways that dry political treaties and economic policies simply couldn’t and can't as I don’t think we’re wired that way, perhaps our wiring has been rearranged by numerous psyops, but I imagine we’ve always been this way, who cares the Normans are coming across the English channel I’m more concerned with whether Prince Humperdinck was humping Princess Buttercup. The psychology behind this is fascinating to me at least—people are inherently drawn to narratives that are relatable, sensational, and evoke strong emotions, especially sexually charged ones. Like pigs, our baser instincts are to eat, sleep, and screw and so perhaps those areas of our brain easily stimulated. The image of Bat Boy, splashed across the cover of Weekly World News, is permanently imprinted on my mind, far more than the collectivization and elimination of individual countries' sovereignty in Europe's new European Union. A few weeks ago on our various Bitcoin socials, everyone was obsessed with one of the PODCONF approved douchbag thinkbois posting contrived photos of he and his prostitute eating pizza on Bitcoin Pizza Day. Well, let the memeing begin, it’s just another day on Twittter. But is it and should it be? As every Ungovernable Misfit knows, Samourai Wallet and T Dev have been wrongfully arrested and are locked in a cage. So many incredible privacy defenders have been doing their level best to bring focus to the Samourai case, one among them bc1984adam. He has been on a quest to get the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who have been fighting for free speech and digital rights as well a fighting the digital surveillance state, since the early 90s as a matter of fact, (see the theme start to come together here). Adam posted a tweet to get the attention of the EFF, @ing everyone involved in the organization, sending good old-fashioned emails, and it worked, he got an acknowledgement email from them, a small step towards getting more eyes on their case.

At the same time he was getting the EFF’s attention, he was raising awareness of the P2P Rights Fund. The Peer-to-Peer Right Fund recognizes there has been a shift in U.S. regulatory perspective, treating developers of non-custodial Bitcoin tools as financial institutions, which could threaten the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. This regulatory stance misunderstands the technology, it will impose undue regulations on various non-custodial tools and criminalize non-criminal activity as well as make criminals of coders who are simply creating privacy tools. Please consider donating to their defense at P2PRights.org

Consider every time you get caught up in some fun Twitter drama or insignificant, nit picking spat with another pleb, that your time, energy and attention are focused on Bat Boy and not NAFTA. You think saying Jeff Gillooly is a lot more fun that saying Yasser Arafat. Okay who are we kidding, they’re both fun to say. But it takes away your focus from more important happenings, like what is happening to Samourai, right now.

People consume scandal like pigs at the trough, greedily gobbling up every juicy morsel of gossip and scandal. They plunge their snouts into the slop, oblivious to the muck splattering around them, driven by an insatiable, frenzied, and almost grotesque hunger for more. Bitcoiners appear to be no better than the gen pop, wallowing in sensationalism and ignoring the more substantial, albeit less pornographic events unfolding around them like privacy and free speech under attack. You know the names and you know their purpose: diversionary tactics, infotainment, tabloidization, spin, misdirection, Yellow Journalism, clickbait, misinformation, disinformation….Bread and circuses, always has been. Don’t be a blindless consumer, unaware of the world beyond your pen, beyond the trough you’re likely holding in your hand, right now. Don’t be distracted by Bat Boy… and… don’t be a pig.